The invention relates to a guiding stand for continuous casting plants, in particular for casting plants for billets or blooms, comprising rollers supporting the strand at opposite sides thereof and arranged in a supporting framework. At least the rollers at one side of the strand, for the purpose of adjustment to various strand thicknesses, are mounted in guide rods that are pivotably arranged at the supporting framework and are pivotable by means of an adjustment device.
A guiding stand of this kind is known from German Pat. No. 1,171,119. The rollers provided at one side of the strand, in this known stand, are mounted in a stationary part of the stand, whereas the rollers for supporting the other side of the strand are mounted in radially arranged guides of a stand part that can be displaced relative to the stationary stand part. The rollers of this displaceable stand part are connected, by guide rods engaging their bearing necks, with the bearing necks of the opposite rollers mounted in the stationary part of the stand. When changing the roller distance of oppositely arranged rollers by displacing the displaceable stand part, the bearing necks of the rollers of the displaceable stand part will slide in the radially arranged guides. Since such guiding stands for continuous casting plants have to be within the cooling chamber, those radial guides are subjected to intensive dirt accumulation from rust, cinders, etc., so that it is not possible to change the casting format without having checked and serviced the guides before hand. Furthermore, the displaceable guiding part has to be heavily dimensioned in order to be sufficiently rigid, which results in the additional disadvantage of having to dimension the displacement device for moving the strand part accordingly heavy.